Losing empathy? Rethinking moral injury in policing through professional deformation

• In Event: Police culture revisited: The implications for voice, silence, and other harmful outcomes

Abstract

Police are often exposed to traumatic incidents and human suffering. Scholarship on the consequences of coping with such stressors notes that officers can experience ‘compassion fatigue’ and ‘moral injury’, causing reduced job satisfaction or even burnout. Both concepts describe a state of emotional depletion, decreased empathy, and detachment due to prolonged exposure to others’ suffering and have in recent years gained significant traction. Recent research in the field of neuroscience, however, suggests that compassion fatigue in particular may misrepresent this depletion as ‘losing’ the capacity to empathize with others [i.e. empathetic distress], which fails to acknowledge the (neuro)protective effects of compassion. In this article, we rethink compassion fatigue and moral injury through professional deformation to capture the gradual distortion in police officers’ attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors that not only generates cynicism, emotional detachment, and a loss of idealism toward their work, but also impacts officers’ personal lives. We combine two case studies—one in the Netherlands, the other in Canada, including ethnographic field notes and a total of 154 interviews with police officers, to reveal how officers navigate empathic distress in light of the systemic constraints they face. First, we examine the emotional and psychological ‘injuries’ officers experience from situations that challenge their empathy. These injuries manifest as ‘symptoms’ of professional deformation, including hyper-vigilance, burnout, and struggles with work-life balance, which they attribute to repeated exposure to incidents involving mental health crises, domestic violence, and civilian aggression. Finally, we find that officers use adaptive ‘treatments’ that tap into compassion’s restorative capacity through accommodating civilians and exercising discretion, which buffers against empathetic distress. Our findings provide new insights into how moral injury manifests in policing and highlight the critical role of institutional support in mitigating emotional depletion and enabling officers to sustain empathy.

Authors

• Laura Keesman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Holly Campeau, University of Waterloo